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ARCHITECTURE: MIES SHOW AT MODERN

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By PAUL GOLDBERGER
Published: February 10, 1986

THE Museum of Modern Art's sprawling exhibition celebrating the

centennial of the birth of Mies van der Rohe, which opens to the
public today, begins not with a glimpse of the Barcelona Pavilion, or
the Seagram Building, or, indeed, with any of the designs for which
the great architect is well known. It opens, instead, with a huge
photograph of a temporary mock-up of the Kroller-Muller house, a
design made in 1912 for a large villa near The Hague that was never,
in fact, built in final form.

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It is an arresting image, and a brilliant starting point. For this house,

REPRINTS
a remarkable building of asymmetrically arranged wings of stripped
classicism, at once shows us Mies's strong ties to the Germanic
classical tradition and points to the future. It points backward and
forward, and makes it absolutely clear at the outset that Mies's
extraordinary buildings of glass - the mid-20th-century skyscrapers
and houses for which he is best known, and which can truly be said to have changed the
world - did not come entirely from nowhere.
In the Kroller-Muller House, a building of almost haunting beauty, we can see a simple,
direct and self-assured classicism that looks back to the great 19th-century German
classical architect Schinkel. But at the same time, in the balancing of light, horizontal
masses, this house looks ahead; we can see in it glimmers of Mies's legendary Barcelona
Pavilion of 1929, or his Tugendhat House of 1930.
To anchor Mies van der Rohe in the greater scope of architectural history, then, is a goal of
this exhibition, and one at which it succeeds well. We do not see Mies here only as the
maker of glass boxes; though his glass buildings are properly the climax of the exhibition,
we see how they evolve from his earlier work, and how that in turn is not without its roots
in the architecture that preceded Mies.
It is not easy to offer a new look at one of the most intensely studied architects of this or
any century, an architect whose first retrospective at the museum was as far back as 1947,
and whose buildings have, at this point, the status of icons in our culture. It is harder still
to do so without any kind of revisionist theory to make it all seem fresh and new.
Happily, Arthur Drexler, the director of the museum's department of architecture and
design and the chief organizer of the exhibition, has felt no need to re-invent Mies van der
Rohe, to re-cast him in the light of what must surely be called the post-Miesian era. But
neither has he joined the ranks of the sycophants who for so long saw Mies's tough,
rationalist view of architecture as a supreme gospel, and would brook no opposition to it.

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Instead, Mr. Drexler has presented to us a Mies who was neither god nor devil, neither allpowerful nor tragically flawed. The architect is seen with reason and perspective, criticized
gently where appropriate, and never shown to us as infallible. In one of the most pleasing
sections of the exhibition, an alcove has been filled with studies for Mies's proposal of 1930
for a war memorial to be erected in Berlin; we see version after version, indicating the
architect's own uncertainty, as well as the difficulty with which he struggled to use
architecture to express emotion.

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ARCHITECTURE - MIES SHOW AT MODERN - NYTimes.com

9/23/14, 9:28 PM

Elsewhere, we are reminded of the debt Mies owed to the architects of the de Stijl
movement in the Netherlands - a debt he himself was reluctant to acknowledge - and of
the weaknesses of some of his completed projects, such as the buildings on the campus of
the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where Mies taught after he fled Nazi
Germany and which became in many ways his personal academy.
Yet in no way can this exhibition be interpreted as anything except a glorious homage - it
is just that it pays homage to the reality of Mies van der Rohe, not to the image that grew
up around him. Although, as the opening panel of exhibition text states, Mies saw
architecture ''as an Olympian challenge to the rational mind,'' he knew, like all great
artists, how to bend his own rules. Mr. Drexler shows us with obvious pleasure the detail
of the side of Mies's great masterwork, the Seagram Building, in which the architect hid a
concrete wall with a false pattern of marble panels covered with bronze window mullions an obvious exercise in making ornament, a far cry from the ''truth'' that Mies's buildings
were presumed to represent.

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''Purists, sometimes more Miesian than Mies, have raised an eyebrow at the elasticity of
his logic,'' the wall panel comments wryly.
But Mies's willingness to make Seagram slightly eccentric, and not a work of absolute,
utter rationalism as his acolytes might have preferred, was a critical aspect of his genius.
For what made Mies van der Rohe among the greatest of all architects was not really his
determined rationalism; it was his ability to create a basically rational architectural
language and then use it to make poetry.

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This is what distinguishes Mies himself from the Miesians, from the numerous followers
who littered the cityscapes of America, and in some cases the world, with glass boxes in
Mies's name. The fact is that the Miesian style, though it became the corporate
architectural style in the postwar world, was never very suited to be a broad-based style: it
depends too much on refinement, too much on the perfection of certain details, too much,
even, on the contrast between the shimmering qualities of a perfectly positioned glass
object with the older and more eclectic cityscape around it.
1
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